About Covid. Millions and millions of people were told they weren't essential. And since millions and millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and have few, if any, relationships outside of work, people were anxious about their very existence. Covid didn't give us all anxiety. It poured gasoline on a growing fire that's been burning for years.
When I say anxiety, I'm talking about all of it. Yes, I'm referring to clinical anxiety, phobias, and social anxiety. But I'm also talking about debilitating worry and fear and chronic stress and burnout, and how our lives have been flooded with constant, heightened levels of threats and chaos.
Anxiety is no longer just a clinical term - it's now part of the cultural vernacular. it encompasses everything from panic attacks to feeling lonely, angry, scared, or buzzing from the low-level hum that something big and scary and unseen is coming our way.
We weren't designed for digital yet physically distant relationships. We humans have never had to live in an endless sea of information, opportunity, mating choices, food, and mobility. It's a tsunami of both great and terrifying things. In this new world of everything all at once, we've missed the mark about how to respond.
Everybody keeps asking about anxiety. Anxiety isn't the problem. Anxiety is just the alarm system letting people know things are off the rails. People have created very anxious lives, and their bodies are trying to get their attention.
Anxiety is just the smoke alarm, letting you know that something in your house is on fire. The alarm is not the problem. The fire is.
I'll say this directly because there's too much at stake: What we're doing is not working.
We have created frantic, chaotic, roller-coaster lives. We've either been dropped into anxious ecosystems or we’ve build our own anxious lives from the ground up.
All the while, we're living in an environment we were never made for. We've created a world our bodies cannot live in.
We listen to untrained, uninformed, or unwise voices, and we follow them willingly into the next distraction.
Anxiety is not the problem. The problem is that we are unsafe, disconnected, unhealthy, and living like we have no say in what happens next.
We can no longer try to avoid these bad things. We must build a resilient, non-anxious life that allows us to absorb the hits.
Let's worry less about the alarms and focus more on what's causing them to sound off in the first place.
Self-sabotaging choices. My body was running, fighting, and hiding - desperately trying to do something about something I couldn't do anything about - and I was chaotic, not sleeping, way-overeating, out-of-my-mind stressed and angry. My body was trying to let me know I wasn't safe. That I was alone. That I had outsourced the greater decisions being made about my future. This was anxiety.
Personally, I don't care for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM's) overly sophisticated slicing-and-dicing of the human experience. It's like we spilled milk on the floor and we are all standing around arguing about it, talking about it, naming different types of spills, trying to come up with theories on spills and the history of spills…and no one is cleaning up the milk.
People internalize their diagnostic label and say thing like. "I have anxiety," and it becomes a fixed characteristic in their hearts and minds. In time, this identity often becomes the lens through which they see themselves as broken or dysfunctional.
Consider this: Anxiety is generally your body's way of trying to take care of you and get your attention. Through the right lens, anxiety can even be considered a friend.
Anxiety is a hardwired threat response that our brain-body uses to protect us. ... In other words, anxiety is the alarm spinning up feelings and stories against any future danger that might come at you. Anxiety calls you to prepare for war.
Dr. Brewer suggests that anxiety, the alarm system residing deep in your brain, is a "reward-based learning system" elegant in its simplicity yet extraordinary in its effectiveness. Thus anxiety can become a habit.
Anything that becomes a distraction or a pacifier from the source of anxiety (the fires) can, over time, become an addiction.
What Dr. Brewer so beautifully articulates is that at first, anxiety is simply an alarm that sounds in response to a trigger. Over time, the actions that turn down the alarms become habits. We reach for our phone, a doughnut, or a drink whenever we get stressed. Eventually, these habits develop into full-blown addictions. We become addicted to the alarms.
Dr. Brewer says it this way: "A thought or emotion triggers your brain to start worrying. This results in avoiding the negative thought or emotion, which feels more rewarding than the original thought or emotion.
And here's one more frustrating twist: if our brain is addicted to the alarms, but there are no death traps in sight, it may spin up a painful story from the past, or choose to interpret current inputs in a tragically negative way… Your mind will begin to see dragons and demons and bogeyman everywhere in order to satisfy the alarm addiction. ... As we try to avoid them, the anxiety alarms will grow stronger and louder.
Anxiety alarms are connected to the parts of our brain that filter and direct memories and emotions. When we experience bad things or scary things or dangerous things, our body puts a GPS pin over that person, object, or experience. This happens with major acute traumas, and it also happens in rather routine moments across a person's life.
Anxiety is connected to memory. ... Your body switches to autopilot, seeking to hide or reach for something soothing.
The alarms go off, and your alarm system can't tell the difference between the past or present or future. It struggles to decipher between your imagination and real life. If your system had a motto, it would be: Better safe than sorry. Better to sound the alarm and be safe, than to be in danger and remain quiet.
After a while we'll do anything to numb out or distract ourselves from the piercing shrill: food, drugs, alcohol, work, anger, obsessive thinking, sex, perfectionism, fighting, spending, hoarding, cleaning, mercilessly talking down to ourselves, social media… Many of these responses are good in the right context. Great, even. But when used to deflect, avoid, or cover up, they become habits. And then addictions. And then identities. Powerful devices to keep the real world at bay. In short order, anxiety can become a miserable, stressful, unpeaceful way of avoidantly navigating the world. These numbing devices usually work for a while. Some of them work really well. They can quiet the alarms and provide temporary relief. But the fire of your life will rage on and on and on. And when we try to cover up or just squash the alarms, we also shut off the good things too.
Our brains are trying to intellectually control things we have absolutely no control over. It's your mind running through game-time scenarios when there's no game being played. And whether it's real-life disagreement, an imagined moment in time, or simply a rehearsal of potential fights to come, our bodies gear up to fight or run all the same.
Besides showing up as rumination and excessive worry, anxiety can show up as "toxic perfectionism". … Many of us have been there: believing or behaving like everything is ruined if anybody makes one mistake.
Grief is the gap between what you hoped would happen, or how you thought things would happen, or how you thought things would be, and what actually happened. When your body detects the gap, it feels your world is not as it should be, so it sounds the alarms.
Grief is accepting reality. Sitting in it. Owning it. Make no mistake: Grief is dreadful and uncomfortable. So much so that our bodies try to work around it with actions and movement and overthinking, as I said above. We deny it. We work more hours. We live at the gym - or at the buffet. We play video games until all hours of the night. But there is no healing without grief. You can't heal without sitting through the alarms and owning your reality. And it's here, in the dark knight of your soul, that the small light of hope becomes visible again.
What if we didn't throw a blanket over the anxiety in any way? What if we turned and stared it down? What if we walked right into the middle of it? A non-anxious life is one where we pause and listen to what the alarms are telling us. We head toward the alarms, not away from them.
When we come to understand that our body is getting our attention by sounding anxiety alarms, it's easy to think we are no longer ourselves. That we have an affliction. A defect. But we're not broken. We're not damaged goods. Our bodies have just finally said, "Things have to change."
As I said earlier, the narrative we've been given around anxiety is largely nonsense. It's often untrue, unhelpful, and it's burying a generation of people under the faulty idea that they have a disease, or bad genetics, or that they've been cursed and will have to live a life of huddled terror and chronic stress.
If you are struggling with chronic stress, fear, worry, or even full-blown anxiety or panic attacks, it is something you're experiencing, not who you are.
Anxiety is an alarm system that can become a habit and, over time, an addiction.
When you believe you have anxiety, you begin to see signs of it everywhere: In people and situations that make you nervous. In hard conversations. In obstacles at work. In disagreements with your spouse. Over time, anxiety can be a badge, a context for your struggling body, and an excuse - all at the same time.
With the right support, mentoring, and a good plan, you can teach your body that while you are indeed facing serious threats that need attention, you are safe and equipped to grow through whatever challenges come your way. You will learn to trust your body's alarm systems, possibly for the first time in your life.
Anxiety medication saved my life. Anxiety medication did not heal or cure me. I ignored my alarms for years. I said yes to everything, had zero boundaries, was in debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and never slept. I spent excessive energy ruminating on catastrophic thoughts, I gossiped, ran my mouth, and disconnected from my friend community. My doctor ultimately recommended I take some anxiety medication, not so I would be healed or cured, but to help turn down the alarms so I could do the work I needed to do to be well.
The main thing to remember is, the alarms are not the problem; the fire is the problem. If you continually avoid the alarms, or medicate them down so low that you can function without making changes, your house will burn down around you. Medications can provide support as you chose to no longer hide from, avoid, or evade the fire.
So if anxiety is not a disease, it's not a new identity, and if medication isn't the ultimate answer, then we find ourselves in need of new questions. The questions are not: "What can I no longer do or enjoy now that I have anxiety?" or "How do I fix anxiety?" or "How do I cure anxiety?" The new questions we need to ask are: "How do I build a non-anxious life where the alarms aren't ringing all the time?" and "How do I build a life that offers me peace, purposeful work, resilience, deep relationships, and joy?"
One thing we know about anxiety is that it narrows our field of focus. It makes us acutely aware of the perceived threats coming at our own lives, right now. Our vision constricts, our ability to think rationally or big-picture dissolves, and we become obsessed with survival. We're zoomed in on our belly button while the ceiling above us is caving in. Everything in us gets tense. Scared. Life becomes us versus them - whoever them happens to be. And when we isolate ourselves long enough, the only enemy left is us. We declare civil war. Against ourselves. All our attention gets pointed inward. Almost without warning, it's you verses you.
Many people want to think they can avoid making choices. They're convinced they can run from responsibility, or the work involved in building a non-anxious life. Let me make this clear: You are making choices every day. And these choices are either creating an anxious world or a non-anxious one.
Your body knows how well you are, regardless of how to try to numb it or lie to it. Our bodies are constantly solving for reality, even if we are not. We can wear masks, feel pity, create distance, or pretend things are different than they are, but our body is keeping the score.
Choosing reality is where all healing and change begins.
Many folks I walk alongside speak only of the darkness. They refuse to acknowledge the good and the beautiful things. They walk through life with their head down, refusing to see the beauty and laughter and blessings.
By choosing reality, we opt to look at the full spectrum of truth. The dark and the light. In one situation, we're not looking at the darkness because we're terrified of what we'll see. In the other situation, we're unable or unwilling to acknowledge the light because our bodies are so locked into scanning for threats…
So, our brains are often chasing solutions to unsolvable problems. And when it can't solve them in the past, it casts them into some unknown future. Our bodies are sprinting on a hamster wheel to nowhere.
Truthfully, as the most distracted people in history, choosing reality is incredibly hard. It's just too easy to check out and look the other way.
I've quietly found that the smartest and most successful men and women I know do not have an apocalypse plan. Not because they have a death wish, but because they understand there is little to plan for when the end of times arrives.
Being non-anxious isn't about trying to ignore every unsavory and ugly thing. Avoiding the alarms makes them louder and stronger. Being non-anxious also isn't about imagining and trying to solve for each and every catastrophic scenario in my present life either. This is a fool's errand.
But to heal from anxiety, we must no longer avoid it or run around it. We have to go through it
Choosing to do life alone is choosing to have an anxious life.
Let me boldly state: If you don't have love, if you don't have friendship and connection and community, your anxiety alarms will ring off the wall.
When you owe people money, you don't get to decide what to do tomorrow.
Government leaders spend your money in ways they would never spend their personal funds.
And thanks to social media, we're no longer just keeping up with the Joneses, but we're keeping up with every single person on the planet.
Our stuff screams at us. It's relentless. Clutter and excessive consumption are directly linked to anxiety.
Boundaries come from believing in your time and your space enough to protect it.
Building a non-anxious life involves taking on all the voices in your head.
Anxiety is integrally linked to reactive living. Non-anxious people aren't reactive. They are intentional.
Becoming aware is about recognizing your impulses and pausing to consider your next move. It's about being thoughtful, patient, and intentional about what you choose to say, think, or do next. This is the practice of stretching the gap between stimulus and response.
Being curious helps you arrive at truth and a calmer response much faster than a mindless rush to judgment.
Mindfulness lifts your eyes away from yourself so you can take in the world around you. It helps you shift from reacting to responding.
You can only choose what happens next.
A cornerstone of the non-anxious life is the daily choice to honor, love, and maintain your physical health.
Few things have been more misunderstood, misrepresented, and flat-out lied about than nutrition science and the related nutrition industry. Our bodies are not designed for a steady stream of readily available foods acquired with little or no effort.
We worship what we think will save us.
We live in an age when sarcasm and pessimism so often present as wisdom, while joy and optimism so often show up as insanity.
If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.
The moment any of us think we have arrived, the dragons show up.
About Covid. Millions and millions of people were told they weren't essential. And since millions and millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and have few, if any, relationships outside of work, people were anxious about their very existence. Covid didn't give us all anxiety. It poured gasoline on a growing fire that's been burning for years.